For a the past month or so, I've been having problems with one of my hard drives. I have a master/slave set up with C: being the master with windows and everything, and D: being the slave with all my files and digital media. The D: drive is where the problems have been happening. First it was errors about not being able to locate the file with messages about needing to reformat the drive, but a restart usually took care of this. Scan Disk did run a few times, the first time it fixed things and the second time it said everything was unreadable. Then when I booted up my computer my entire hard drive was gone (D:). I've been reading around on the internet about how running scan disk wasn't such a good idea, but now I don't know how to recover my data/get my hard drive back. Also: my drive is not listed under device manager or disk management. Is it worthwhile to get my hard drive back? Can I do something like reformat it or is it going to keep giving me problems. What about my data? Any recovery possible? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

"I've been reading around on the internet about how running scan disk wasn't such a good idea," Bull droppings! You said you have WinXP, but it doesn't have scandisk. Download a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturer's web site.

It could be because you IDE configuration isn't optimal. It's best not to pair up 2 HDDs on the same cable, or 2 optical drives on the same cable... See responses 2 & 3: http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/36298.html Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz 768MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

Once the IDE config is straighten out, try the diagnostics as suggested Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz 768MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

As much as I agree that you are set up wrong I cannot believe that could make the drive disappear either. I would first of all change out the cables, and if you don't have any to do so with, take off the optical drives and use that cable to boot the hard drives. If nothing changes,the drive is probably gone. Ide drives remember were only guaranteed for 3 years, though one year towards the end of their primary mfgr when sata drives took over,not to say they could not last longer, but they were really made like crap at that time period. And do you really want to trust your data to a drive that probably is heading South? Why not take the drive to another pc, slave it and see if another pc acan read it and if so, copy off whatever you can!

I called Ontrack Data Recovery Services. 1-800-752-7557 I used there free trial, found my software and then paid $200 for the software to save data on another drive. I called 8 data recover places. http://support.wdc.com/partners/recovery.asp Easy Recovery Data Recovery http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoverydatarecovery/ Since my data had been mistakenly deleted on a second phycical hard drive, and the drive had not been repartitioned, this software worked wonders. All my data is back 100%.